Highlights
- The loot system in Hogwarts Legacy has received criticism for emphasizing quantity over quality, with gear pieces lacking uniqueness and meaningful gameplay modifications.
- The sequel to Hogwarts Legacy should consider improving the gear system by offering a smaller selection of more varied gear and making gear pieces more impactful with gameplay alterations and benefits.
- Alternatively, the sequel could remove the loot system altogether and provide other ways for players to customize their gameplay experience, such as through cosmetics that are more grounded in the game's world.
When it comes to the next game in the Hogwarts Legacy franchise, developer Avalanche has a solid foundation to build from. 2023's Harry Potter RPG was a massive leap for the developer in terms of both technical achievement and game design, and audiences responded well to it. However, the game isn't perfect, and as players speculate about potential changes in the Hogwarts Legacy sequel, it's worth considering how Avalanche could alter, or potentially remove, one central feature of the game.
Hogwarts Legacy was marketed as an RPG and in many ways, it lives up to that title. Players can create their own character, choose their Hogwarts house, and make various decisions throughout the game, mainly when speaking to NPCs. There are some ways that the game's RPG systems could be improved, though, and one common criticism of the game is how it handles loot. As Avalanche evaluates Hogwarts Legacy's strongest and weakest elements, the loot system is a good candidate for enhancement, or for the chopping block.
The Sequel to Hogwarts Legacy Needs to Rework the Loot System
While there are many highly requested features that never made it into Hogwarts Legacy, one ubiquitous RPG staple made the cut. This common feature is a loot system, specifically a system that is built around abundant gear with different levels of rarity. Most modern RPGs do feature loot and gear, but Hogwarts Legacy seems to take a page out of the looter-shooter playbook, which many fans feel emphasizes quantity over quality.
A key issue when it comes to loot in Hogwarts Legacy is how most pieces of gear can become instantly devalued. Very few pieces of gear are actually unique when it comes to their appearance or gameplay modifications, with most only offering generic stat boosts while often sharing their appearance with other pieces of gear. Hogwarts Legacy does have a gear upgrade system, but this does little to make the benefits of loot meaningful or interesting from a gameplay perspective. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that gear obtained from the game's many chests is random much of the time, which makes the process of looting quickly turn into a chore with very little reward.
The sequel to Hogwarts Legacy should take steps to improve the gear system. The most obvious solution would be to greatly decrease the amount of loot in the game, offering a smaller selection that is more varied. This would mean drastically reducing or completely eliminating all instances of replicated gear—something that is all too common in Hogwarts Legacy. Hogwarts Legacy's sequel could further improve the loot system by making gear pieces offer meaningful gameplay alterations and benefits, rather than flat, oftentimes minor, stat increases. Perhaps certain items could grant access to additional spells, or alter existing abilities. This would allow gear to have a real impact on the game, making it more interesting.
Alternatively, the sequel could do away with loot altogether. Looting gear may seem like a necessity in modern RPGs, but there's no reason that a game couldn't work without it. The next Hogwarts Legacy game could offer other ways for players to tweak their gameplay experience, ways that aren't tied to equipped gear.
When it comes to cosmetics, there could still be outfits, but the sequel to Hogwarts Legacy could tone things down by making the cosmetics more grounded within the game's world, stripping away gear items like the Sanguine Mask or Spider Slayer Armor, which would likely not be donned by an average Hogwarts student anyway. In this way, apparel could be purely cosmetic and easy to obtain, doing away with the need to make each gear piece valuable in its own right, which is easier said than done.
Hogwarts Legacy is currently available for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S, with a Switch version releasing November 14.
